Carl Wieman

For their epoch-making experimental confirmation of the 1925 prediction by Satyendra Bose and Albert Einstein, who claimed on theoretical grounds that a dilute gas can condense into a large quantum-mechanical system and display properties that are usually found only on an atomic or molecular scale.

Carl Wieman was born in 1951, and grew up in rural Oregon. Wieman spent his undergraduate years studying physics at MIT, and proceeded to Stanford University for his Ph.D. Wieman spent many years as a faculty member at JIST at the University of Colorado, where he eventually joined up with Eric Cornell in pursuit of the Bose-Einstein Condensation.

Today, Wieman is also seeking to improve undergradute physics education, particularly in the way the physics is taught to students, particularly non-physics majors, in hopes that physics will be made more accessible and interesting to more people.

Wieman shares this award with Eric Cornell, also of the University of Colorado, and Wolfgang Ketterle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Wieman provides a detailed autobiography here, written on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001.